South Korea Seeks a New Role as a Higher-Education Hub

[Harold F. Schiffman]

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i28/28a00104.htm
>>From the issue dated March 21, 2008


South Korea Seeks a New Role as a Higher-Education Hub
By DAVID MCNEILL

Seoul, South Korea

New arrivals in South Korea receive a crash course on the country's
startling transformation at Incheon International Airport. The gleaming
terminal, opened in 2001, squats in a foggy flatland of rice paddies and
scrawny forests about an hour west of the capital, Seoul. Two generations
ago, much of the southern half of the Korean peninsula looked similar,
until ambitious technocrats helped turn one of Asia's poorest nations into
the 11th largest economy in the world.

Now they want to turn South Korea into the East Asian capital of higher
education. Several American colleges are in talks to set up academic and
research ventures here, while Korea's top universities are retooling
themselves to be more competitive with elite institutions in Singapore,
Japan, and China as well as the United States. The changes are driven in
part by a crisis that is gathering pace year by year: A growing number of
students opt out of South Korea's higher-education system to study abroad.
If such ambitions seem far-fetched, consider government plans for the
Incheon Free Economic Zone, a 52,000-acre business hub, to be anchored,
says a 2007 plan, by a cluster of world-class research and academic
institutions. For several years, Incheon has been quietly luring foreign
investors with the offer of rent-free campus buildings and seed money.

The work seems to be paying off: the State University of New York at Stony
Brook and North Carolina State University have signed agreements to set up
degree programs and research projects here. Several more American
institutions, including the University of Southern California, George
Mason University, and George Washington University are reportedly in
discussions to do the same. "Our goal is to create a global center for
cultural and intellectual exchange," explains Hee Yhon Song, founder and
former head of the College of Northeast Asian Studies, in Incheon City,
and a key broker in the new agreements.

Mr. Song predicts that Incheon could eventually play host to more than 40
research institutes and at least seven foreign campuses, luring students
from across the region. Eventually, he and others believe, South Korea
could be the center of a regional government, along the lines of Brussels
in the European Union. "You know, this region is going to produce
one-third of the world's GDP, but we don't cooperate" with each other, he
says. "We are building a North East Asian economic community, so we are
going to need universities where people can talk to each other."

Looking Outward

Incheon is only the most striking sign that South Korea's inward-looking
higher-education sector is retooling for what Mr. Song calls a globalized,
English-speaking world. The authorities in other special economic zones,
including the fast-developing port city of Pyeongtaek, about 90 minutes
southwest of Seoul, have invested millions of dollars in joint educational
ventures. Pyeongtaek last year signed an agreement with the Stevens
Institute of Technology to set up a graduate school in the newly created
Pyeongtaek University City and is in talks with several more American and
European universities.

Jeju Island, on the south coast of the peninsula, tried but ultimately
failed to attract a campus of George Washington University. South Korea's
first foreign university, the Netherlands Shipping and Transport College,
opened in September in Gwangyang, another port city on the south coast.
Meanwhile, the country's best colleges have embraced ambitious new
foreign-language programs. The country's leading research university, the
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, is in the midst of
perhaps the most profound reorganization in its 37-year history, under
President Nam Pyo Suh. Mr. Suh says he is determined to make Kaist, as the
university is known, into a "truly global institution." (See article, Page
A24.) Kaist also plans to build a new biotechnology research facility in
Incheon.

The country's top private university, Yonsei, has established South
Korea's first all-English four-year liberal-arts institution, Underwood
International College, intended to attract both Koreans and foreign
students. Underwood's assistant dean, John M. Frankl, says the changes are
long overdue: "There is no globalization here. Koreans just go abroad."

'We Are Extremely Worried'

The statistics are sobering. Despite spending 2.6 percent of its gross
domestic product on higher education second only to the United States and
more than twice the average of most Western countries South Korea lost
218,000 university students to foreign study last year, a figure that has
almost doubled since the mid-1990s. About 30 percent went to the United
States, making South Koreans the third-largest group of international
students there. "We are extremely worried," admits Pilnam Yi, of the
education ministry's University Policy Division, who estimates that South
Korea has an annual educational-trade deficit of $3-billion to $4-billion.
Mr. Song believes the figure is closer to $10-billion.

The ministry makes no secret that the student drain has become a crisis,
and that persuading more to stay at home is a priority. The government is
offering subsidies to colleges that teach in English and supporting
efforts to lure more foreign professors. The country has an abysmal record
of attracting foreign academic talent: A 2007 ministry survey found that
South Korea's 23 public universities employed just 22 full-time foreign
professors.

But the quality of South Korea's universities needs a lot of improvement
before either foreign professors or many more Korean students make them
their first choice, argues Mr. Suh, of Kaist. "The problem is an absence
of really high-quality research institutes," he says. "Like Japan, we have
not done a good job of developing the next level of research and
technology." Kaist is at the cutting edge of what reformists believe South
Korea must do to transform its higher-education sector. The president has
required that from this year, all undergraduate classes will be taught in
English, and professors and students must now compete to retain tenure and
scholarships.

The university is also throwing its doors open to non-Koreans. "The goal
is to create a completely global environment in which foreign professors
will feel comfortable teaching here," explains Taesik Lee, an assistant
professor in the university's faculty of industrial engineering. Kaist
plans to add hundreds more students and professors over the next few
years, says Yong-Taek Im, a professor of mechanical engineering there. The
university recently recruited Mary Kathryn Thompson, a
mechanical-engineering professor, from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. "Korea changes faster than any place I've ever seen, and
that's its strength," she says.

Eyeing the Competition

But is South Korea fleet-footed enough to leapfrog over its regional
competitors to become a world-class educational hub? It depends on who you
ask. Mr. Song says South Korea's central geographical position Seoul is a
two-hour flight from Beijing and Tokyo along with its size, mature
economy, and Western-educated elite, give it advantages few in the region
can match. "I believe we are unique," he says. Yet just 22,600 foreign
students studied in South Korea in 2006, according to the education
ministry, compared with more than 100,000 who went to Japan.

And certainly many foreign universities have struggled to put down roots
nearby. Australia's University of New South Wales recently withdrew from
Singapore less than a year after opening its doors because of low
enrollment. Japan tried to internationalize in the 1980s and 1990s by
enticing dozens of American universities to set up branch campuses there.
It was a spectacular failure: Japanese student were uninterested in
attending what many saw as lower-tier universities, American or no. Today
Temple University Japan is the last such campus still standing.

Even skeptics of internationalization here admit that South Korea's more
outward-looking business culture gives the country a better chance than
Japan of grabbing a slice of the global education pie, but they say that
proponents of internationalization underestimate the difficulties. "We
struggle to recruit international students, so how are these new
universities going to do it?" asks Jongryn Mo, dean of Yonsei's Underwood
International College, who believes the Incheon experiment will ultimately
fail. "Even if Harvard comes to Korea, it is not going to work because
they will never attract good staff here."

Mr. Mo believes that any hope for becoming a hub rests with South Korea's
established universities, like Kaist, Seoul National University, and
Yonsei. Academics who have studied some of these new education hubs say
South Korea must address a number of challenges as it moves to
internationalize its higher education. For one, it will have to compete
with fast-rising China, Malaysia, and even Thailand, points out Don
Olcott, who directs the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a
London-based research organization. "All these countries want a
sustainable education system."

Students also pick their destinations with both cost and work potential in
mind. "International students often aspire to stay on and work in the host
country before heading home," says Christopher Ziguras, associate
professor of international studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology, in Australia. South Korea's industrial jewels particularly
cars, electronics, and video games could help it punch above its
educational weight and attract foreign students.

"I imagine universities will be most successful in attracting students in
areas where Korea is successful in leading a particular industrial field,"
says Mr. Ziguras, who points to Singapore, with its electronics and
chemical industries, as one successful model of that approach. Whether the
answer to South Korea's problems lies with building up its own
universities or building campuses for foreign ones, it's clear that the
competition for students and faculty members will be intense. "We're in a
10-year window of major change," says Mr. Im, the Kaist professor. "Only
time will tell the outcome."

http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 54, Issue 28, Page A1

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